An Inconvenient Truth

Global warming is absolutely inevitable. Prior to my study in the ECS111 course (and reading the eye opening book An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore), I honestly had no knowledge about how global warming worked, and the effects of it. I knew it was a huge controversial issue with plenty of debate (I can’t describe how many times I’ve heard “Al Gore made that up” since mentioning the fact that I was in the process of reading it,) but I never had a say in it, for I never took the time out to learn about it. I have noticed that so many of the points brought up in the books, and the graphs provided by research studies in the book, are incredibly similar, if not head on, to some of the lectures ...

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gases “allow light from the sun to come into the atmosphere, but trap a portion of the outward-bound infrared radiation and warm up the air (An Inconvenient Truth, 28).” Simple. Within the few pages, I already learned something that previously I wasn’t able to understand. Greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, are crucial to the Earth. They assure that the Earth is not freezing at zero degrees Fahrenheit, and keep our environment in bearable temperatures for us and all of the other organisms on the Earth. What I was unable to see previously was that we unnaturally produce way too many of these trapping gases, and they all get stuck in the atmosphere, causing unnatural and excessive warming. Most of our activities that we conduct to get around every day and make a living actually require burning fossil fuels. “When we burn fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, and coal) in our homes, cars, factories and power plants, or when we cut or burn down forests, or when we produce cement, ...

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as “temperatures shoot upwards (126).” In 2002, the largest ice shelf in the Arctic (the Ward Hunt shelf) cracked in half, and it had never happened before in history (127). This clearly demonstrates the temperature increase is a serious issue. If the ice caps continue to melt at dangerous rates, sea levels will rise intensely, and freshwater will be continuously plunging into the salty oceans, which will affect sea life adapted to their salt water ecosystem. Gore also shows images of how as the iced areas melt and more water is exposed, more heat is absorbed by the open waters. This becomes an uncontrollable issue as the warming waters begin to melt the edges of the already melting ice, ...

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